Diminishing Returns at Work The Consequences of Long Working Hours

John H. Pencavel provides an overview of how the length of working hours evolved from the 19th century to today and how the number of working hours affects work performance and other outcomes, including health, well-being, and wages. Diminishing Returns at Work provides a brief history of working hours both in the United States and Britain, including the influence of trade unions pushing for shorter hours of work, the tension with employers who resisted reducing hours, and the influence of legislation and custom. Pencavel discusses various conceptual frameworks for specifying production functions that measure the relationship between inputs and outputs and develops an alternative approach to estimate actual relationships through a reevaluation of classic studies, including the productivity of munitions workers in Britain during the First and Second World Wars and plywood mills in Washington during the 1980s among others.

The declining effectiveness of long hours is manifested not only in marketable output but also in a rising probability of ill-health and accidents, and evidence of this has been found both for blue-collar workers and for white-collar workers. In short, shorter hours of work might benefit both firms and workers.